In this article we look especially at the Philippines because of the large number of Filipino mothers and fathers who work outside the country for years at a time.

The extraordinary growth of HIV infection in the Philippines seems to occur in synchronicity with the increase in incest and rape.

HIV is like a time-bomb with children. The early symptoms look like every other virus kids bring home from school. You don’t think to test a child for HIV. It’s time to start.

Rape and exploitation of children is a global epidemic, not Just PH.

This is true partly because the global lifestyle and attitude shifts to patriarchal authoritarianism around the world give less meaning to the rule of law;

the world has an overpopulation problem hence women and children are dangerously devalued; and

partly because there are now nearly five dozen serious armed conflicts in the world wherein rape is a common weapon of war.

Specifically in the Philippines, Incest and Rape is not just a morality issue but a complex socio-economic calamity.

Going back to the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship era, a shift began in the importance of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) because the Philippines’ economy went sour under the authoritarian rule of martial law. The shift was from an emphasis on male workers to female. Most female OFWs are employed in elementary occupations.

As a consequence the numbers of children with an absentee mother or father are many millions. Whole generations have grown up motherless or fatherless. Nobody protected these kids the way a natural parent would.

Today on the basis of The RINJ Foundation‘s field research and straw polls it is safe to say that eight out of ten children have experienced rape, sexual assault or sexual harassment.

The numbers of OFW documented and undocumented workers is completely unknown. The estimates range wildly from 2.4 to 10 million. There is no valid tracking of these numbers in the Philippines that anyone can provide. This likely is because of lagging extensible computerization of public records. And it is not an easy task.

A brief pictorial look at the vulnerabilities.

Guns and fear are everywhere. These men fear being robbed. Photo Credit: Melissa/Feminine Perspective

Police do not serve and protect, they earned the reputation of being more likely to rape and kill you. Photo Credit: Melissa/Feminine Perspective. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryk99_qQ5E0

Children reach out on any street in Manila to grab what they can and run, Photo Credit: Melissa/Feminine Perspective

Some children living on the street only have one or two meals per day. Photo Credit: Melissa/Feminine Perspective

One quarter of the population is below the poverty line which is pegged at an absurd $2,500 per year. Photo Credit: Melissa/Feminine Perspective

The wealthy live behind bars in fear of the hungry poor. Photo Credit: Melissa/Feminine Perspective

The streets of Manila Photo Credit: Melissa/Feminine Perspective

Dr. Lisa Grace Bersales, the Undersecretary National Statistician and Civil Registrar General of the Philippines undertook a survey of OFWs to, as she says, “derive national estimates on the number of Overseas Filipino Workers, their socio-economic characteristics and the amount and mode of remittances, in cash and in kind, received by their families”.2017 Survey on Overseas Filipino Workers (Results from the 2017 Survey on Overseas Filipinos ) Reference Number: 2018-082. Release Date: May 18, 2018

* The OFWs covered in this report were those aged 15 years old and over and working abroad during the period April 1, 2017 to September 30, 2017.

* “Data on remittances in this report are based on the answers given by the survey respondents to the questions on how much cash remittance was received by the family during the period April to September 2017 from a family member who is an OFW and how much cash did this member bring home during the reference period, if any.”

This all means that Millions of Children Have no Protectors.
How to fix that:

Daddy is gone, or Mama is gone or both are gone away. That doesn’t just sound sad. It is sad.

Families should be together. There are ways to increase the national productivity with education and leadership such that people can earn at home in the Philippines and at the same time watch over their children and protect them. Having fewer children makes this easily possible. The current TFR of 4.2 must be cut in half.

The typical child in these circumstances is left with someone else to care for them while the parent(s) work outside the country to hopefully provide a better future for their offspring. It doesn’t really work.

Maybe it helps the small few governing dynasties that own the shopping malls or online stores where somebody spends the money you earned elsewhere, but it is bad for your family for the parents to leave the kids for a few years–quite unnatural in fact.

That must change. Keep your family together. Raise smaller families and look to each other’s skills and those of your community then cooperatively develop and share those skills and build collaborations that have the potential to earn.

Agriculture in the Philippines has not been developed. And there is no cooperative infrastructure for getting produce to market. Start thinking about refrigerated trucks and co-ops to build intermediate refrigerated depots and warehouses. The potential when communities work together is awesome. Foreign development funds are available for these kinds of ventures. Don’t be a sheep, be a leader.

While Children are Unprotected they are Vulnerable
So fix that too:

The typical incestious rape happens to a female child between the ages of 8 and 15. That is the most common occurrence.

The rape of that child will happen two to three times a week and that routine continues for up to three years. By that time a phenomenon like the Stockholm Syndrome (The child is in effect held prisoner by a terrible secret and by threats hence their feelings shift to support & sympathy and they may even bond with the captor.) and of course a bad case of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) is on its way if not present.

The hidden killer is HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections like Hepatitis. They are killers because they go unreported and untreated.

You need to Test, Detect and Treat your HIV Infection

Don’t give up if you have become infected. There are almost three dozen antiretroviral drugs that depending on the patient and the timing of test and discovery can be used to give a patient a normal, AIDS-free life. But patients who are not tested because of this horrible secret, are at grave risk. Another fatal aspect of incest. I know of cases where the rapist did not know the child had been also raped by an infected person. Sex with children almost always leads to lacerations and the transfer of microbial contaminants to the bloodstream.

The calamitous killer of spreading HIV to children is “the terrible secret”. The fear. Parents may not know their child has the virus for up to ten years. Many bad things are possible. By that time the incestious rape survivor has grown up and may be having infected babies in adult life. Yet she could have been treated.

By that time the rapist may be dead. Nothing but hell comes from incest.

Sexing Children is not your Entitlement. It is a Major Crime

Sexual assault upon a child is common in the Philippines. Previous governments agreed that this was a horrifying reality of tribal male entitlement. For stepfathers, uncles, and other de facto caregivers, there this was a capital crime, a death penalty, for raping your child.

We know rapists rape often. There is a certain promiscuity to that behaviour and the result is sharing of bacteria and viruses. Some are killers.

It is a law still on the books, that was never taken off when the death penalty was suspended in the Philippines via Republic Act No. 9346, which was signed by President Arroyo on 24 June 2006.

The current leader of the Philippines intends to bring back the death penalty. This as once before puts incestious rapists in the position of wanting to murder their victims before they tell someone. Usually they threaten to kill the OFW mother upon her return as a means of buying silence.

The RINJ Foundation began in late 2015, while performing its functions, to derive information from local provincial sources and actual patient contact for free patient services.

RINJ made a calculated decision to shift focus and staff from the wars in the Middle East to the Philippines because:

of political and ethnic unrest in the south, the Manila government has limited its ability to manage and control most Mindanao regions except by military force (Martial Law)–nearly half of the Philippines’ population lives in fear and oppression;

the population is responsive to humanitarian action;

there is a growing wealth of trained medical workers in the Philippines; and

help is desperately needed.

The Age of Consent in the Philippines is 12. Are we off our rockers?

There is an elderly man in his 90s who has coffee once in a while at my favourite bakery. He has lived in the Philippines longer than I have been alive. I asked him why this childhood age of consent ever happened. He said it was because the men that ran government in Manila decades ago, had everything that a corrupted government could give them except they could not legally sex children, but they were often getting into trouble sexing the plentiful numbers of vulnerable kids. Therefore they passed a law that made sexing kids legal. He used stringer words than that.

In tens of thousands of hours of patient experience with kids and moms in many countries around the world in many circumstances, I/we have learned that kids will be kids. Your 13 year old who is showing little breasts is as cognitively competent as an onion or a potato when it comes to making serious life decisions about sex and life. No kidding. Those cognitive centers of the brain are not developed.

It’s not just The RINJ Foundationbut other organizations which have been around longer than RINJ , like UNICEF for example, say the same thing. Children do not have the cognitive skills they need to make this decision until about the age of 16.

Population is already out of control. We already have eight year olds in the Philippines getting raped and pregnant. Humankind is not that desperate to have more babies, in fact, the Philippines can’t feed more babies. Already there are millions in a bad way, born into extreme poverty and hunger.

How Can We All Help?

Test everyone for HIV and other STDs and stop the spread.

Limit ourselves to monogamous behaviour.

Educate people about how to detect, manage and avoid spreading HIV.

Build treatment programs.

Communicate and educate to get rid of the stigma.

Here is incredibly good news. At the present rate of development, a cure for HIV may be possible by 2020 or close. That’s two years from now. Stay healthy. Communities must focus on prevention and on care for the sick.

President Duterte Has Verbalized some Gems needed in the Philippines. Pay attention to Gems.

Tackling pollution.

Contraceptives and family planning.

Halting the runaway birth rate.

While some aspects of the current leadership of the Philippines. women loathe, such as encouragement of rape and overall hatred of women and children (misogyny), President Duterte has great potential for doing the Philippines a lot of good at an epic level.

Some dictators in history were benevolent to their people. Some got things done that otherwise would be trounced by a corrupted set of pretending democratic bodies of government.

There is no real democracy in the Philippines. The people do not make realistic decisions about government because they are told lies that are whoppers. Daily. Corruption is mind boggling. What exists is a sham. President Duterte has remarked on that himself many times.

The in-power elite is disconnected from the country, and made up of family dynasties that in effect are identical to Sicilian Mafia crime families. How does one deal with that?

To save this country, Duterte may be what is needed. But he needs to leave a democracy behind him when he moves on.

We can’t forgive killing drug users. Those people had valuable lives, human rights and needed the love of their fellow man, not hatred and death from sick minds. Drug offenders can been rehabilitated in work teams cleaning up Boracay and Baguio. In any case, we need to move forward and deal with tomorrow, and fast.

OFWs must start coming home, take care of their kids, and rebuild their country.

Duterte’s Messages Have Some Gold

Contraceptives for everyone and a birth rate that plummets downward from the skyrocketing 4.2 TFR (Total Fertility Rate) are essential. That means each woman capable of having children has an average of 4.2 kids. That is outrageous. Dangerous. For this country that is a recipe for a monumental disaster, fast approaching, like a runaway train.

Pollution, greed, lack of potable water, lack of waste disposal, sea salt and fish that are filled with microplastics, and dirty coastlines are collectively clobbering us. Most of this we can fix. When do we start?

These plus overall corruption have made the Philippines stagnate and now the country faces becoming a completely failed nation. Come home and stop that. Don’t leave it to your sad children.

This is one reason why ISIS is staring at the Philippines. Those despicable parasites thrive in failing regions for a short time but like all parasites they are morbid to their host. They end up killing themselves as they kill their host unless they move in sufficient time to hurt and kill another population.

More Solutions – A community of communities recipe.

Without getting into the political situation too deeply, the body politic of the Philippines needs to accomplish the following, fast, in order to help the problem of incest, rape and nation-killing infectious disease epidemics.

Really, these things are a symptom of worse problems. Core issues. Working together Filipinos can do some things immediately that will immediately make a difference.

Compel fanatical religions in the Philippines, like the Catholic Church for example, to fund substantial government-run orphanages and child care facilities concomitant with a cessation of brainwashing Filipinos against safe health practice like family planning and the use of condoms. Like, get a brain, Bishops. Look at condoms not as birth control but as being the only barrier that will eventually save you from HIV/AIDS as it spreads through everywhere. And don’t talk to me about God’s will, Mr. Patriarchal Bishop. I don’t even need you to come help me treat a rapidly growing number of sick patients, just shut your gob about matters of the medical health community. Shame on you for getting us all to the point of extreme overpopulation and rampant disease infestation. You have done harm. Get out of the way while good people try to solve the problem. And don’t touch another child.

Immediately begin distribution and education on the use of both male and female contraceptives.

Focus strong effort on education to support small business endeavours. OFWs must come home, become productive, and care for a fewer number children.

A TFR of 2.1 is needed in the Philippines as fast as that is possible. Even lower and faster is better for now. Maintaining a TFR of 2.1 is a status quo for the Philippines population, in other words, that is the replacement number for the existing population taking into consideration things like infant mortality.

Rape and incest are adding to the child birthing rate. People who sex children have severe personality or mental disorders and need help.

Mr. Duterte should toss the current process of appointing judges and create a management board to appoint female “Justices of the Peace” in every province to help administer justice. These are ordinary civilians who tend to be academics, medical professionals or just community workers who stand out as law-abiding citizens who care for their fellow beings. Secual violence is a crime against the community. Incorruptible Justices of the peace can put raping stepfathers and uncles in the prisons or into work gangs who could clean up other places like Boracay.

These are ideas to encourage people to think.

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